Vogue’s New World: American Fashionability and the Politics of Style
1
Fashion Theory, Volume 10, Issue 3, pp. 1–24
Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
© 2006 Berg.
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf is an
independent scholar currently
based in Nigeria. Her research
focuses on gender and youth
cultures in the African world;
embodiment and cultural
creativity and feminist theory.
She graduated with a PhD
in Interdisciplinary Women
and Gender Studies from
the University of Warwick.
[email protected]
Fabricating
Identities:
Survival and
the Imagination
in Jamaican
Dancehall Culture
Introduction
An assessment of recent work on Jamaican dancehall culture reveals the
absence of any systematic analysis of the role that fashion and adornment play in the culture. This is surprising given that fashion is a prominent and constitutive part of the culture and the site for vigorous debate
about lower-class women’s morality and sexuality in Jamaica. This failure can only be attributed to the fact that analyses of dancehall culture
have generally focused on lyrical content, the sound system and the
economic production of music (Stolzoff 2000; Cooper 1993a). I suggest
that underlying this focus is the implicit assumption that music equates
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Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
with interiority, language and “deep” meaning. In contrast, adornment
and fashion are considered to elude or even destroy meaning. Therefore,
to invest energy on adornment conjures up images of superficial, transient and frivolous activities undertaken only by women (Polhemus 1988;
Tseëlon 1997), in contrast to the serious male world of ideas connoted
by music production. While undeniably significant for a critical analysis
of dancehall culture, a continued over-emphasis on music and lyrical
content, to the neglect of other aspects of the culture, unwittingly
privileges the activities of men and their interpretation of the culture to
the exclusion of women.1
In this article, I want to shift attention away from lyrical content and
a specific focus on Dancehall culture to examine the embodied practices
that emerged in the late 1980s to the end of the 1990s in Jamaica. I
argue that working-class Black women in Jamaica use fashion to fabricate a space for the presentation of self-identity and assertion of agency.
Through adornment, dancehall women have been able to address creatively the anxiety, violence and joy of daily life. At the same time, they
have been able to register historical, cultural, economic and technological changes through their bodies (Breward 1994). Prior to speech
or any written manifesto, different modes of adornment are employed
to contest society’s representation of and expectation about lower-class
leisure activity, morality and sexual expression. In a nutshell, fashion
allows dancehall women2 to challenge the patriarchal, class-based and
(Christian and Rastafarian) puritanical logic operating in Jamaica. Of
course, the wider context in which this articulation of social relations
has taken place is that of socio-political and economic realities which
includes continued anti-black racism, black nationalism and global
cultural and economic restructuring. In this sense, far from fashion
being meaningless, superficial and unworthy of cultural analysis, it
allows working-class black women to invest their everyday lived realities
with multiple meanings and processes which links them to both the
spectacular fetishism of global consumerism and mass media semiosis as
well as the African love of ceremonial pomp and pageantry.
The fact that dancehall women most often do not consciously adhere
to this critical position in their speech, nor readily perceive their action
as jamming the hegemonic syntax, is quite beside the point.3 Phenomenology teaches us that there is often a gap between intentional action and
explicit, self-aware interpretation (Tseëlon 1997). Far from imputing a
kind of rational, contestive voluntarism to dancehall women, I suggest
that the significance and meaning of their action as a form of contestation is not always available for self-articulation. As such, my account
and interpretation of the meaning of fashion and adornment in the
culture is not wholly circumscribed by empirical enquiry into conscious
explanation, speech acts, or verbalized discourse. Rather, my analysis
is based on both empirical engagement and my own analysis of the
expressive body in the culture. This body, its desires and perceptions are
Fabricating Identities
3
seldom fully disclosed within speech; rather, they are made manifest in
a variety of bodily practices.
Changing Times, Changing Styles
Fashion styles are always embodied and situated phenomena, reflecting
and embodying social and historical changes. Prosperity, crisis and social
upheaval are stitched into the fabric of every epoch. For example, the
extraordinary wealth of Renaissance Europe was materially layered into
the ornate and elaborate detailing of upper-class clothing. In contrast, in
its rejection of the sumptuous and colourful style of the ancien régime,
post-revolution France adopted a less ostentatious and simple cut in
order to reflect newfound freedom (Breward 1994; Connerton 1989).
Fashion and bodily practices became a crucial site to both express
wealth in the one case and challenge old hierarchies in the other.
Among New World Africans, fashion and bodily practices have also
absorbed and expressed key symbolic functions. Starting from the long
revolution fomented in the hold of the slave ship, when the enslaved cut
their hair into elaborate designs (Mintz and Price 1976) and reaching
its apogee in the Black Power movement of the 1970s, bodily practices
were as important as political manifestos in the struggle for freedom,
agency and assertion of cultural identity. The “natural” Afro hairstyle,
dashiki, large-hooped earrings, psychedelic skirts and patchwork
miniskirts of the 1960s and 1970s signalled a rejection of European
aesthetics. Fashion styles visually represented and extended the ideological affirmation and valorization of blackness and Africanity in
circulation during the period. Like their North American counterparts,
many Jamaicans adopted Africanized textiles, kaftans and long flowing
brightly coloured majestic robes, head-wraps and jewellery made from
natural materials such as seashells. However, during this period, the
most important challenge to the aesthetic and ethical sensibilities of the
Jamaican elite came in the form of Reggae music and the wearing of
dreadlocks. Many Rastafarians and Reggae fans adopted dreadlocks
and the military uniform of khakis and combat trousers. These motifs
not only posed a challenge to the white capitalist and Christian ideology
pervasive on the island, but they also drew attention to the permanent
state of warfare that characterized life in the downtown ghettos of
Kingston. Rastafarian fashion, in particular the wearing of dreadlocks,
performed a critique of the dominant regime, asserting an alternative
cultural, ethical and aesthetic sensibility in its stead.
In the late 1970s, the rise of Edward Seaga’s neo-liberal free-enterprise
government heralded a new era of increased insecurity, violence and
anxiety. This political turn gave rise to a corresponding cultural
energy. Popular cultural expression on the island such as music, dance
and clothing style moved away from the socialist, pan-Africanist
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Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
eschatological project associated with the Rastafarian Reggae of Bob
Marley and Michael Manley’s socialist government towards what
appeared to be the hedonistic, self-seeking pleasure and excess of
dancehall style (Chude-Sokei 1997, Barrow and Dalton 1997). Because
the elite found it offensive and it was not initially given airplay on
national radio, dancehall music was generally produced and consumed
in the open air or indoor spaces designated as dancehalls. Dancehall
music or ragga (as it is known in Britain) is reggae’s grittier and tougher
offspring, making use of digital recording, remixing and sampling while
DJs “skank” or “toast” over dub plates (Jahn and Weber 1992). To
the ruling elite, the music was considered pure noise, a cacophonous
drone that grated the nerves. The lyrics were considered bawdy, guttural
and sexually explicit. Finally, the elite considered dancehall (especially
female) dress and adornment brash and excessive, reinforcing the view
that lower-class Black women were sexually permissive. As a whole, the
subculture confirmed to the Eurocentrically inclined elite the immorality
and degeneracy of the urban poor.4
In contrast to this disparagingly reductive view, dancehall culture
should be viewed as a complex reminder of the continued relationship
between popular expressions, commodification, urbanization, global
economic and political realities and historico-cultural memory. For
example, in music, older Jamaican styles and practices were revived and
brought into conversation with new digital technologies and global flows
of information (Bilby 1997). In terms of dance, dancehall unearthed
older Jamaican forms such as Dinki Mini and Mento. As the Jamaican
choreographer and cultural theorist Rex Nettleford notes,
The movements in dancehall are nothing new; in my own youth
I witnessed and participated in mento sessions which forced from
executants the kind of axial movements which concentrated on
the pelvic region with feet firmly grounded on one spot (1994:
1C).
Dancehall fashion fits into a general “African love of pageantry,
adornments and social events . . .”. (Mustafa 1998). The AfricanAmerican folklorist Zora Neale Hurston suggested that “The will to
adorn” constitutes “the second . . . most notable characteristic in Negro
expression” (1933: 294). The will to adorn, she argued, is not an attempt
to meet conventional standards of beauty, but to satisfy the soul of its
creator (ibid.: 294). I suggest that the desire to “satisfy the soul” and
project their own aesthetics onto the world is at the core of dancehall
women’s sartorial practice.
Fabricating Identities
5
Dancehall fashion
In a society influenced by Christian Puritanism and the sexual conservatism of Rastafarian ideology, dancehall fashion has responded
antithetically with bare-as-you-dare fashion. Unlike previous African
diasporic youth subcultures, dancehall is unique in that women are
highly visible. Although there are a number of prominent female
dancehall music performers, women’s visibility in the culture centers
on their ostentatious, sartorial pageantry. The “session,” “bashment”
or “dance” is an occasion for visual overload, maximalism and the
liminal expression of female agency. Women form “modelling posses”
or rival groups, where they compete with each other at a dance event
for the most risqué and outlandish clothes. Their consumption practices
are largely funded through the informal sector, as hagglers (informal
commercial traders), petty traders, cleaners, dancehall fashion designers
or by having a “sugar daddy.” Many of the outfits are designed and
made by the wearer or by a local tailor. The style appears anarchic,
confrontational and openly sexual. Slashed clothing, the so-called
“lingerie look” (such as g-string panties, bra tops), “puny printers”
(showing the outline of the genitals), Wild West and dominatrix themes,
pant suits, figure-hugging short dresses and micro hot pants infamously
known as “batty-riders” are favored. Revealing mesh tops, cheap lace,
jeans designed as though bullets have ripped into the fabric and sequined
bra tops became an essential part of dancehall women’s wardrobe in
the 1990s. At the close of the 1980s, the dancehall female body was
wrapped in bondage straps and broad long fringes or panels attached
to long dresses to accentuate the fluidity of the body’s movement in
dance. Incompatible materials and designs were juxtaposed – velvet,
lace, leather, suede, different shades of denim, rubber and PVC, as well
as animal prints such as mock snake, zebra and leopard skin, to produce
an eclectic personal statement. Seemingly irreconcilable colours are
combined to produce a refreshingly audacious, motile canvas on the
dance floor. According to Carolyn Cooper, the sessions are the “social
space in which the smell of female power is exuded in the extravagant
display of flashy jewellery, expensive clothes [and] elaborate hairstyles”
(Cooper 1993a: 155).
Hairstyle, make-up and jewelry are a key part of the dancehall look.
In the late 1980s to late nineties, huge cheap and chunky gold earrings
with razor-blade designs, as well as necklaces with dollar signs were
worn on the ears, nose, nails, waist, and belly button as status symbols.
More recently, the style has moved towards “ice” (slang for diamonds)
and “bling-bling” (code for expensive jewelry and accessories). Hair is
either dyed in bright colors or covered in metallic-colored wigs, weaves
and extensions (platinum blonde, orange, turquoise, aubergine, pink).
This style disrupts the Jamaican elite notions of “good” and “natural”
hair versus “bad” and “processed” hair. In so doing, dancehall women
6
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
Figure 1
Batty-rider. Photo: The Gleaner
File
draw attention to the artifice of African hairstyle (Mercer 1987) and
the way “black women exercise power and choice” (Banks 2000: 69).
In opposition to the Jamaican elite preference for understated beauty
characterized by lightly applied make-up highlighting flawless skin,
dancehall women’s make-up is deliberately bright, glittery and brash.
Fabricating Identities
7
Shoe styles continue the sexual fetish theme of the clothes: laced or
zipped up stilettos, knee or thigh-length boots in patent leather or
“pleather” are favored for their emphasizing effects on the crotch and
thighs. High-heeled strap shoes that coil round the calves towards the
knees complete the image (D’Elia 2002).
Disrupting Beauty, Class and Gender
Given the intensity of dancehall modes of adornment, the question
that arises is how to account for the phenomenon, both in terms of
the socio-historical context of Jamaican culture and dancehall fashion’s
position within a global economy of signs and material flows. Here, I
will identify three interwoven processes at work. First, I will point to the
ways in which the fashion disrupts Jamaica’s elite ideas of black female
beauty and norms of appearance, via an overtly sexualized paradigm
shift towards what I term the “aesthetics of voluptuousness.” Secondly,
I will show how practices of adornment in Jamaican dancehall are
women’s response to a “limit situation” in which the issues that face
them on a daily basis are issues of survival and keeping the terror of
daily life at bay. Contrary to the conventional (Western) impulse to
assume that limit situations necessitate a victim mentality, attenuating
agency and expression in the process, I will argue that limit situations
can stimulate the collective imagination to heightened states of intensity
and excess. Finally, I will show how dancehall fashion is located within
a network of global flows and exchanges. Rather than being a uniquely
local phenomenon explicable solely in local terms, dancehall fashion
demands a broader understanding of how both local and international
signifying systems have been adopted and appropriated by Jamaican
women, creating the distinctive aesthetic form and self that is dancehall
style.
In order to understand the ways in which modes of adornment in
dancehall work to disrupt existing conventions of the beautiful and
express sexual difference, we need to appreciate the Jamaican upperclass perspective against which it responds. In Jamaica, as elsewhere
in the New World, the voluptuous black female body came to embody
upper-class anxiety over the moral status of the lower class. According
to Carolyn Cooper, it is this body that became the site for “ongoing
struggle over high culture and low, respectability and riot, propriety
and vulgarity” (Cooper 2000: 350). Just as in late eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Europe, where a distinction was made between the
modest and chaste (typically upper-class body) woman and the vulgar
and obscene (working-class and African body), a similar bifurcation
takes place in the Caribbean. The European upper-class moral ideal also
operates on the island with an accompanying aesthetic transfer. The
ideal look for elite Jamaican women is essentially a white look: slender,
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Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
restrained, calm, long flowing (straightened) hair and light or brown
skin. The continued value placed on skin color as an important aspect
of social mobility still exerts its own peculiar influence and particular
form of violence on the psyche of Jamaicans (Douglas 1992; Barnes
1999). Although class is a critically important social vector in Jamaica,
it is often articulated “through the idiom of colour shade and can reflect
biologized notions of race” (Austin-Broos 1994: 218). Class, color/race
and gender in combination constitute what Austin-Broos has called
“Jamaica’s discourse of heritable identity” (ibid.: 218). This discourse
perpetuates and reproduces the cultural logic of plantation society, where
upper-class European values and morality have dominated the sociocultural and economic landscape till the present day. It is the worldview
of the brown or non-black elite which features most prominently in
public arenas such as newspapers, beauty contests and television, and
in the political and economic life of a country where 90 percent of the
population is black. Lower-class black women are accordingly derided
as vulgar, uncontrollable and dangerous. To the ruling elite, the protruding belly, large dimpled buttocks and thighs squeezed into revealing
batty riders marks dancehall women as indecent, morally repugnant
and unproductive elements within society. Writing in the The Gleaner,
André Fanon echoes the views of the ruling class:
Dance-hall becomes a danger when the dance-hall syndrome is
made into a way of life . . . Dance hall . . . under-develops our
women who feel that they must learn to “wine” and “cock out”
their posteriors as champion bubblers. Dance hall as a way of life
emphasises the unproductive elements in society. If not channelled,
dance hall will create a class of people which is incapable of doing
anything productive. (1988: 14)
In their purposely garish coiffure, slashed latex body suits and flashy
gold jewelry, the women assert their distance to and non-conformity
with the sobriety of Fanon’s official culture and all that it represents:
formal work and chaste morality. Importantly, these sumptuary practices
mark dancehall women out as being unaffected by the lack and poverty
that is a characteristic of ghetto life. According to Nettleford, dancehall
fashion “all together spells for many a form of personal liberation from
the strictures of a humourless existence which the hardships of poverty
like the cloying satisfaction of affluence seem to impose on human beings
at the opposite ends of the social scale” (1994: 16D). Dancehall women
contest the association of material poverty with the inability to care
and attend to public self-presentation. As one participant in the culture
succinctly puts it, “I may be poor and come from the ghetto, it don’t
mean I have to look shabby. A woman always has to look good even if
it means spending her last dollar. Going to a dance is the time to dress
up and let the world really see you as you are.” As Paulette McDonald
Fabricating Identities
9
notes of another dancehall fan, “dressing up in expensive clothes sends
a clear message to those who think that ghetto people are the scum of
the earth: they can indeed set the fashion pace” (1993: 10). Dancehall
attire suggests that without engaging in the arduous work of the formal
economy, women in the culture still have at their disposal the money
and creative resources that enables them to invest and participate in
a fashion-based signifying economy. Rather than directing their labor
towards the formal, bureaucratic structure, dancehall women work on
their body as a ‘canvas of representation’ (Hall 1992: 27) so that the
world can see them as they are.
Moreover, against the upper-class slur of idle unproductivity as described by Fanon above, dancehall modes of adornment should be viewed
as a form of work in its own right—the work of creative resistance
as a product of a playful imaginative and historical retrieval. In the
context of a conservative and moralistic society, dancehall adornment
invokes a visual subversion by returning to the subterranean sources of
Jamaican folk culture, demonstrating a capacity to admit variation as a
form of continuation. Of course, as I suggested above, this subversive
historical recall does not necessarily conform to an intentional politics of
conscious resistance. Dancehall female fans often have an unconscious
pre-theoretical response relation to the ideology surrounding them, the
variety of ways it is working through them and the responses engendered
by it. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu points out, “It is because
subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what
they do has more meaning than they know” (Bourdieu 1977: 79). This
unconscious collective agency of bodily action resists theorization in the
language of conscious articulation. As elsewhere, the female body in
dancehall perceives and responds in its own way to forms of affirmation
and negation in the world. Through this unconscious collective response,
dancehall women contest Euro-hegemony as it is manifested in Jamaica.
Whether or not these resistances and refusals could ever be so well
articulated in speech or deemed important is quite another matter.
Indeed, beyond being a form of creative labor, I suggest that the
work of the imagination has as its goal the disruptive parody of the
Jamaican class structure itself. From a perspective influenced by Marx’s
theory of commodity fetishism, women’s stylistic excess can be decoded
as class struggle by other means. The function of creative strategies of
adornment in dancehall is to destabilize the field of class distinctions in
Jamaica. It is helpful, in this context to refer to the work by Jonathan
Friedman (1994). Friedman adopts and critiques Pierre Bourdieu’s
analysis of distinction-making in order to show how the Congolese
Sapeurs appropriate fashion styles (especially that of European haute
couture) in order to disrupt the field of taste distinctions at work in
Congolese society. For Friedman, it is precisely through appropriation,
repetition and strategies of exaggeration and excess that the Sapeurs
destabilize normative conventions of taste. By borrowing modes of
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Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
dress and aesthetics associated with the economic elite, the Sapeurs
(who are mostly poor and urban dwellers) undermine the commodity
fetishism and prestige value with which exclusive European clothing
was previously invested. His argument therefore borrows from and
exceeds that of Bourdieu. For the French sociologist, taste distinction
occurs within a field—a horizon of differences that comprise the
differential fabric of society. For Friedman, in contrast, the work of
adornment among the Sapeurs tears at the social fabric of taste. In a
parallel manner, in dancehall culture, a far more destabilizing dynamic
is unleashed than that of simple social differentiation. Dancehall
women are less concerned about being accepted by or assimilated
within mainstream society, or to pretend to be something they are not.
Again, they are not concerned to mark out a simple difference in taste.
Rather, the overloading of the senses through sartorial extravagance
works to deconstruct and jar the field of distinctions itself, through
the exaggerated mimicry of conventional conceptions of feminine
comportment. In a forceful response to denigration from upper/middleclass sensibilities and the Rastafarian restricted “mother earth” style for
women, dancehall women dress to oppose every aspect of “appropriate”
feminine comportment, appearance and conduct. Whereas middle-class
Jamaican women tend to desire a slender and sleek figure, dancehall
women rejoice in an unruly voluptuosity—the joy of being fat. And
more troubling, slender women have resorted to using drugs, food and
even hormones, the “fowl pill,” to get fat as described in one of Lexxus’
lyrics.5 In opposition to the Rastafarian chaste concealment, dancehall
women revel in exposed flesh. Where both uptown and Rastafarian
women value stylistic restraint (in terms of fabric, fit and colors),
dancehall women value riotous colors and sheer maximalism. In this
sense, the fetishized commodity of cloth in Jamaica, divided between
elite, Rastafarian and poor urban-underclass sensibilities, threatens to
break out of a rigidly Marxist perspective of class struggle to include a
contestation of what it is to be a woman. Dancehall fashion is considered
such a threat by the ruling elite that at the Emergency Department of the
Bustamante children’s hospital in Kingston a “Dress Code” is deemed
necessary to restrict dancehall aesthetic from spilling over into such an
institution:
I.
II.
III.
IV.
Please cover all body parts!!
Please attend to personal hygiene!!
No setters in hair!
NO Dancehall Style! (cited in Cooper 1993b)
Dancehall culture therefore is the site of a contestation of both class
and sexual difference, to the extent that neither can be reduced wholly
into the terms of the other. While the aim of dancehall style is meant
to shock and rebel against the upper- and middle-class and Rastafarian
Fabricating Identities
11
Figure 2
Two women to don’s funeral.
Photo: The Gleaner File
ethos, it cannot be fully understood outside of an attempt to intervene
against repressive attitudes towards female sexuality, appearance and
comportment. Drawing on motifs of deviant sexuality and symbols of
excessive femininity allows dancehall women to express sexual power
and affirm their own sexual objectification at the same time. By presenting
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Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
the fleshy female body as unruly and hyper-feminine, dancehall women
show femininity to be a masquerade, a kind of mask. The question
then arises about how to theorize this masking process and its intent.
In European intellectual history, theories of masquerade can be crudely
characterized in three ways: first, the feminist tradition, which views
masking in terms of patriarchal scopic economy which hides and stifles
the true identity of women (Irigaray 1985; Mulvey 1989). Second,
the psychoanalytic tradition, which regards the mask of femininity as
covering a non-identity, that is, there is no substantive identity to reveal
beneath the mask (Riviere 1986; Heath 1986). Both these perspectives
view masquerade as absence, superficial, lack and negation. In so doing,
they repeat specific assumptions about the relation between surface and
depth, inner and outer, masculine and female. In contrast the third,
broadly phenomenological, approach holds that identity is constituted
through the mask itself. On this view (which traces its roots back to
Nietzsche), there is nothing behind the mask, except yet another mask
and yet another mode of identity imbricated within another potential
surface. In this sense, the layerings that constitute the feminine are
neither a hidden essence, nor a concealment of absence; rather, the
mask is resolutely dynamic (see Karim Benammar). As one layer yields
to another, identity-as-essence gives way to identity-as-performance.
In this sense, femininity as a masked identity in dancehall is therefore
both a performative and a generative space of being, where the binary
opposition between the authentic and inauthentic has no traction.
It is important to remember that dancehall fashion operates within
a patriarchal economy which positions women as the object of male
desire and control. The extent to which the explicit celebration of
women’s sexuality challenges the power relations between the sexes is
therefore limited. Dancehall fashion should, however, be understood
as both an expression of female agency and the opportunity for male
scopic mastery. For Diane McCaulay, a contributor to Jamaica’s newspaper The Gleaner, although dancehall fashion offends her feminist
sensibility because it reinforces the image of women as sexual objects,
she nonetheless sees it as a statement of female strength and agency. She
goes further:
I have to say mostly, though, because I confess to a certain
admiration for the outright defiance of dancehall fashion. Further,
dancehall clothes cannot be said to promote feminine weakness;
on the contrary, dancehall women are clearly not to be messed
with. I am particularly uncomfortable with the inordinate interest
shown by the authority figures (usually men) in the way women
dress, and the quantum leap of ascribing national moral decline to
the popularity of a certain type of female fashion. It is a very short
distance from excluding dancehall from festival to not allowing
it at all. Who is going to decide? Apart from who decides, how
Fabricating Identities
13
are we going to establish what is unsuitable entertainment? What
about carnival? Many members of the middle-class deprecate
dancehall as obscene, while embracing the equally lascivious
gyrations of soca. . . . But there is clearly no real difference between
the display of skin and the drunkenness of carnival revelry, and
the outrageousness of dancehall. (The Gleaner, 1994)
Dancehall women therefore expose femininity as a performative and
generative construction that calls into question the Euro-centric and
patriarchal separation between the Madonna and the whore, life and
theater, real and appearance. The eroticized exposure of ample, black
female flesh in revealing clothes thereby disrupts the patriarchal schism
between the sexualized female body and the maternal body. Mary
Russo (1986) argues that in Western culture, the exposure of the female
flesh, especially the aging, fat or pregnant body, is seen as vulgar and
grotesque, “making a spectacle of oneself.” It is precisely this kind of
female corporeal spectacle that dancehall women seek to celebrate, as
they reject and complicate the dominant reduction of female identity
to a maternal or sexual binarism and the veneration of the slender
ideal. With such self-presentations, the dancehall woman “puts distance
between herself and her observers” (Evans and Thorton 1991:55).
Evans and Thorton argue that this distance enables women to create
“a space in which to manoeuvre and to determine the meanings of the
show” (ibid.). Within a sub-cultural space that both challenges official
discourse and yet nonetheless reproduces its patriarchal scopic framing,
dancehall women have found a way to intervene through their corporeal
styling. Through sartorial eloquence, dancehall women invite the male
gaze only to fend off scopic capture. This is due to the extravagant,
risqué style of their adornment, their dancing skills and the unsmiling,
distant look, which can only be responded to with awed silence by the
appreciate audience—both male and female. Therefore, what appears
initially as sexual vulnerability or availability becomes a form of
defensive armory in which the women assert their own subject position
and an unwillingness to be intimidated by the normative pressures of a
passive femininity.
Beyond aesthetics and a jamming of the class syntax in Jamaica, a
non-European relation to embodiment and corporeal expression is at
work in dancehall. Instead of restraint and a self-confining attitude
towards the body, dancehall women call upon alternative traditions
available within their culture. In this social space, women push the
African love of ceremonial pomp to its absolute limit. The desire for
full-bodied women in Jamaica is celebrated by the women themselves.
Similar to the punk style described by Dick Hebidge and others,
dancehall fashion exhumes an iconography of sexual kinkiness “from
the boudoir, closet and the pornographic film and placed on the streets
where they retained their forbidden connotations” (Hebidge 1979: 108).
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Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
Figure 3
Carlene. Photo: The Gleaner
File
This sexualized expression is taken to the limit, as bulky black flesh
folds over figure-hugging slashed tops to exude an air of self-assurance
and intimidation. This bold attitude and stance tempers the sexual
offering; the “bad, vulnerable girl” image invoking a bodily confidence
is characterized by masculine bravado. Here, we find a psychological
Fabricating Identities
15
corollary to the explicit forms of adornment among dancehall women:
a strident confidence that again seeks to oppose and disrupt the chaste
respectability of the uptown woman.
Survival and Imagination
In addition to the extreme oppositional logic combating class oppression
and the uptown normative violence of feminine respectability, dancehall
fashion speaks of the edgy conditions in which many women in Jamaican ghettos find themselves. Here, we can introduce the metaphor of
cultural energy. When a group is pushed to the limit of existence and
marginalized from the normative centers of the production of meaning
and cultural symbolization, the expressive energy that seeks output from
the group cannot be released smoothly and easily. This energy builds up
and seeks an outlet, like a blocked pipe. What often emerges between
the gaps is an uncontrollable and uncontainable explosion of creative
excessive energy, as desire transduces itself into expression. For dancehall
women, the maximal intensity of their clothing, jewelry and hairstyle is
the body’s response to the existential conditions of their lifeworld: the
noise, chaos and volatility that surrounds. The body transforms itself
into an ocular symphony, an expressive machine competing via visual
overload with the sound booming out of the sound system. The loud
screams of their clothing, jewelry and hairstyle is a retort against the
gutteral tempo of the music. Sartorial excess emerges as a solution to a
limit situation: what Jamaicans call “sufferation.”
Women’s over-investment in extreme forms of adornment in this culture is therefore an essential aspect of what it means to survive. Against
the legacy of plantation slavery, global economic inequality, heteropatriarchal constraint, the violence of class inequality and religious
conservatism, survival entails the transcendence of social death, through
an attempt to overcome the horrors and anxieties of daily life. Survival
for dancehall women means the attempt to generate meaning and sense
in a context of profound meaninglessness and senselessness. In a context
where class, patriarchy and color combine to create a unique blend of
violence and erasure, survival finally concerns the search for identity,
honor and prestige; the attempt to fuse the metaphysical, the spiritual
and the existential in a way that allows the urban poor to “imagine an
undominated fruition and to live within existing dominations equipped
with a determination to do more than survive” (Simone 1989: 158).
Sartorial excess is the way in which transcendence (however
temporary) from the harshness of life in the ghetto is imagined
and manifested. Female dancehall fans may live under the threat
of daily assault and opportunity-denying poverty; they are,
however, the best-dressed poor women. Here, there are parallels
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Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
with other forms of sartorial baroque practices operating as a
survival strategy in different cultural settings. The example of
Sapeurs mentioned above is a case in point. Like the Sapeurs,
for dancehall women, baroque stylization of the body transcends
issue of style towards the fabrication of identities, whereby conspicuous consumption is an aspect of the maintenance of self.
Friedman writes, Consumption is a life-and-death struggle for
psychic and social survival and it consumes the entire person. If
there is a fundamental desperation at the bottom of this activity it
is perhaps related to the state of narcissistic non-being generated
by a social crisis of self-constitution. (1994: 106)
The violence, anxiety and vulnerability of daily life are stitched into the
designs of the fabric. The culture of gunning and knifing down opponents
that characterizes ghetto life is visually woven into the sheered tops and
the motif of bullet holes in jeans. This re-presentation of violence has
the effect of both foregrounding existential reality and erasing it at the
same time. In their reading of Schiaparelli’s 1937 “The Tear Dress,”
Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton have suggested that by combining
the motif of violence with sophisticated high fashion, “Violence and
eroticism are simultaneously displayed and made to disappear; beauty
is brought to bear on rupture” (1991: 50). Baroque sartorial practice
becomes the very means by which daily violence is tamed.
This examination of the issue of adornment in dancehall sheds light
on a specific but ingrained contingent relationship between the question
of “survival” and that of the imagination, expression and identity. Here,
we find a marginalised majority, impoverished, vulnerable and violated
in the midst of an urban and spiritual decay inflicted ultimately by the
abstract authority of Western capital and Europeanized class ideology.
At this point, we are faced with a puzzle that requires something more
than the explanation based on the model of cultural energy referred to
above: how can this basic subversion of need in favour of an excessive
imaginative expression occur in such extreme circumstances? The
expectation is quite the opposite: that it is only in the case of material
comfort that questions of need and survival can be forgotten, replaced
by the bourgeois recourse to worlds of the imagination. In this case,
how can this vigorously unique style fabricate itself within such a crisisridden space?
To answer this question, we need to turn the assumption that
creative excess follows material abundance (and its inverse, that attenuation follows material depletion) on its head. It is clear that instead
of emaciated abjection, dancehall women respond to their sociopolitical and economic plight through the multi-textural imprint of
enculturated cloth. In a culture where appearance fixes and positions
the agent according to a rigid signifying system, dancehall fashion and
adornment actively contests and subverts the system of classification
Fabricating Identities
17
itself. Instead of allowing the body to collapse or be rendered mute and
inexpressive inside the anxieties of everyday life, through clothing the
body is presented as a voluptuous, radiant transcendence of crisis. The
“survival” at work in dancehall conforms to the phenomenological logic
of the mask: instead of a fixed order of necessity—of the basic physical
issues of need and demand—necessity is undercut by the performative
subversions of desire and expression:
Among the “people from below” the device of “masking” (in
fancy-dress) persists with a vengeance. We still have reason to
devise masks to disguise, to create music to affirm, and to assemble
dances to celebrate. The ambush of a less than just society under
the cover of festive masquerades has been one way of experiencing
control, if only a temporary one. Being King or Queen for a day
was a way of having a taste for power, even if it was mock power
and fleeting. . . The actual dress is important. For the costume is a
mask helping to transform the persona to do wild and uninhibited
things—much tulle, dark glasses replacing the old meshwire
masks the Jonkonnu characters wore and still do, sequins and
costume jewellery, beads, baubles of all kinds, earrings (knobs or
droplets), all reminiscent of the pieces of broken mirror on the
fancy dress of traditional Jonkonnu! (Nettleford 1995: 16D)
As with the Sapeurs, survival involves an imagination that refuses to
be flattened by the forces of negation at work beyond the frontiers of
the ghetto. In this way, a truly radical transgression is in operation:
dancehall bears no conformity with even the basic existential/social
hierarchies of Western normative assumptions. Dancehall women live
in such extreme circumstances—of crossfire, acid attacks, rape, spousal
abuse, sole caregiver and negation—that fearlessness itself becomes the
only mode of survival. It is the extremity of circumstance—the toughness
of a life that has been pushed to the limit and is no longer afraid of death
or pain—that enables fearlessness to arise. On the one hand, having
nothing to fear can lead to senseless acts of violence; with dancehall
women, however, it leads to a refusal to acquiesce to the pseudotransgressive logic of the carnival which Jamaican elites find more
agreeable, where a normative order waits to restore normativity behind
the mask. It is precisely in this liminal situation that women finally can
lose any anxiety over the social perception of their appearance. Instead
of the fear of being called a “skettel” or a tart or seen as obscene, the
dancehall woman dresses for herself and her community, without care
for Jamaican uptown decorum and respectability
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Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
Global and Local Flows
At first sight, dancehall fashion appears to be strangely dislocated from
the rest of society, an orchidacious sub-culture extruded from beyond
the rim of mainstream culture. Dancehall adornment springs out like
an alien life form complete with its own entirely separate dynamics of
existence and taste, like fungi on a tree. Dancehall fashion seems to be
the very antithesis of conservative restraint and the concealed style of
both official culture and Rastafarian gender coding. It appears to be
totally divorced from any cultural or historical context or continuity;
springing forth with mutant abundance in a flash of audaciously colored
wigs, raucous screech-screaming lamé and sequined tops stretched
revealingly across expanses of black flesh. And yet, this dislocated
appearance is deceptive. Closer examination of dancehall style reveals
deep cross-cultural and historical connections at work in its constitution,
demonstrating an attunement with a hybrid array of cultural elements.
In an age of transactional flow of bodies, information, goods, mass
media and images, cultural eclecticism has become the only response.
Jamaica’s proximity to North America, with the more than 60 American
TV channels that beam into Jamaican homes, combined with the large
number of Jamaicans in the diaspora, means that cultural influence
and exchange is the norm. Like their counterparts in the sonic world,
dancehall fashion also favors sampling, cutting and mixing in order to give
birth to something different and distinct. Dancehall women have raided
the global wardrobe and given it local texture. Odd and incongruous
materials, imageries, accessories and patterns are combined to produce
dizzying and dazzling layers of material, texture and form. Plastic,
lurex, polyester, lycra, nylon are combined with leather, silk, organza
lace, velvet, brocade. Late 1960s hot pants ride higher into the buttocks
to reveal more than its original ever did; English granny purple-rinse
hair styles become an unrecognizable, chromatic sculptured coiffure on
youthful bodies; the “cut up” and bondage straps of punk were cleaned
up and re-emerged as the “air-conditioned linen summer wear” designed
by Sandra Campbell; Vivienne Westwood’s 1976 Bondage Collection
was hungrily retrieved and stripped of its Nazi associations. Punk girls’
fishnet tights became the now classic mesh string vest. Fake chunky 22carat gold evoked the tradition of goldsmith’s art that flourished in the
former Gold Coast of West Africa, Ghana, denuded of its royalty and
hierarchy and reduced to a kitschy repetition of the original. The bridal
nose ring linked to the ear by a fine delicate chain connects dancehall
women to a tradition of Bollywood-esque ostentatious display. All
these motifs are emblematic of the way in which dancehall women
have absorbed and adapted global fashions, goods and images, and
inflected them with new meanings that have made them refreshingly and
uniquely Jamaican. This is what Hudita Nura Mustafa, in her account
of changing fashion in Senegal, has termed the “sartorial ecumene.”
Fabricating Identities
19
Sartorial ecumene refers to the “incorporation of objects and images
of global origins into [local] practices and circulations involving dress
and bodily adornment” (Mustafa 1998: 22). It is in the surface of adornment that the creative subjectivity and agency of women at the core of
dancehall styling should be understood.
The fabric and cut of aspect of dancehall fashion has a direct lineage
to the Jamaican masquerade tradition of Jonkonnu and “Pitchy Patchy.”
Here, women are clothed in strips of material gathered together to give
the appearance of a jumble of loose layers of fabric. This historical
connection enables us to understand a key point about dancehall culture:
that it is far more closely connected to the deep fiber of the Jamaican
folk tradition than the ruling elite would like to acknowledge:
Old characters like Pitchy Patchy have their counterparts in contemporary dancehall. The best jeans (stone washed or plain) are
made to look ragged with designer-looking patches of varying
colours, with strategic rips or strips hanging like the organised
raggedness of traditional Pitchy Patchy. (Nettleford 1995: 16D)
Female adornment is grounded in a dense hybrid matrix of borrowings
and repetitions, creating a truly diasporic culture of excess that is at
once deeply embedded within a Jamaican folkloric tradition and again
a manifestation of cultural borrowing and exchange from outside.
Dancehall fashion is therefore a historical palimpsest, providing glimpses
into layers of other historical styles, traditions and symbolic systems.
Having prowled through the international circuit of goods and images
and woven them back into the local fabric, dancehall women return
them to the world of consumption for further re-stitching. Dancehall
fashion has quickly gathered its own international crop of sartorial
disciples who raid and absorb the aesthetic reservoir of global streetwear and turn them into high fashion, by changing the context and the
price and investing them with a symbolic capital that was missing in the
early incarnation. Stripped of its rawness and tamed to suit European
high-fashion tastes, dancehall fashion becomes an object of desire that
those who are scornful of dancehall (but secretly admire it) can now
wear. This is later recirculated among dancehall style aficionados to
signify renewed prestige and taste in a complex feedback loop of call
and response. For example, as the 1990s drew to a close, dancehall
fashion connoisseurs turned to the very couture designers they inspired.
Moschino and Versace are favorites among dancehall fashionistas (with
their labels hanging out to show that they are wearing the “genuine”
article). The issue of “original” and “copy” in reality however have little
importance: designs, fabrics and modes of accessorizing are inscribed
within a system of incessant borrowing and dialogue to the extent that
it becomes futile to fixate on origin. Which came first, Pam Hogg’s
autumn/winter 1992/93 slashed latex body suit or the slashed t-shirts
20
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
doing the rounds in Jamaica around the same time? Are Versace’s goldencrusted jeans an original which the dancehall fashion aficionados
imitated? The answer to these questions is impossible to resolve.
The line of influence of any cultural artifact is often not obvious or
explicit; in dancehall the line is a spaghetti sprawl of loops and curves.
Origins and originals are the stuff of bourgeois distinction-making
and intellectual property rights—elements with no meaning in a world
where the distinction between fake and real has little purchase. Rather,
the incessant appropriation, re-appropriation and expropriation of
global/local exchanges reveal the intrinsic mutuality of cultural artifacts
and patterns of expression. Through dancehall’s sartorial borrowing
and transfer, fashion is perpetually caught up within a dynamic of
differential repetition that has multiple origins.
In this article, I have argued that dancehall fashion and corporeal stylization show how women inured by life in the urban ghettos of Kingston
interpret their life world, inflect it with meaning and recycle the different
cultural artifacts circulating within a global economy of sartorial signs.
Beneath interpretation and a semiotic analysis, however, I have indicated
that dancehall styling is ultimately a question of survival; an excessively
imaginative response to the class, race and gender-based normative
violence of the hegemonic morality of the uptown elite. I hope to have
encouraged an appreciation of the ways in which, prior to speech and
lyricization, women in dancehall culture exhibit an expressive styling
that ultimately should be characterized as a defiant performance of
generative identity in the midst of perpetual existential crisis.
Notes
1. This is not to deny that women do also contribute to the production
of music as is evidence with the prominence of female dancehall DJs
such as Lady Saw, etc. However, through sartorial practices a larger
group of women can participate and contribute to dancehall culture.
Fashion and adornment thus becomes a democratic space which
allows different categories of women to participate in the production
of symbols and cultural meaning.
2. Not all female participants in the culture dress so flamboyantly,
however. Dancehall women therefore refer to those women who
spend a considerable amount of their time and resources attending
the dancehall events, drawing attention to themselves at any event
through their fashion style which stands them out from the rest of the
crowd. It is these women known as dancehall “divas” or “donnets”
who have aroused interest, fascination and vilification all at once
who are the central subject of this article.
3. During the fieldwork for this research it became clear that some of
the subversive and transformative potential I attributed to dancehall
women were not always explicitly shared by dancehall women.
Fabricating Identities
21
Many pointed out that they had not intentionally set out to challenge
hegemonic structures. Rather, they were simply dressing for themselves
and the dancehall space provided them with the opportunity to
express themselves. The gap between how participants understand
and explain their action and my own interpretation of their action in
no way detracts from the argument. It is important to remember that
Jamaican women have a long history of resisting oppressive regimes
and articulating their existential positioning using a variety of media.
I locate dancehall women’s sartorial expression as a continuation of
this history of resistance and cultural production.
4. It will be true to say that Dancehall music and culture has now
become mainstream, but its energy, creativity and reproduction continue to be drawn from the socio-political and economic realities
of the marginalized urban poor. Despite being a major Jamaican
cultural export, Dancehall still occupies an ambivalent place within
Jamaican elite cultural imaginary.
5. In Let those Monkeys Out, Dancehall DJ Lexxus sings about the use
of bleaching cream by dark-skinned women to acquire the browning
effect, and their increasing use of fattening pills used in industrial
chicken-farming to acquire a ample body is so valorized in the
culture. A verse from the lyrics goes,
Me hear some o’ them nuh stop take the fowl pill
MmMm, so me know she them gyal there skill
A take the fowl pill just to impress Phil
When you see them you fi shout, ‘Dill dill’.
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